I wrote the following in March of 2020. I submitted it officially to a few places but nobody likes me. So I'm leaving it here as evidence that this was not unprecedented. Only the center-right liberals of the Democratic Party could manage to lose an election to a sundowning gameshow host. Twice.
Joe Biden will lose to Donald Trump.
Not because Trump is that popular. Not because Bernie Bros will sit out the election or vote Third Party out of spite. Not even because Joe Biden is a repulsive old reptile with a liquefying brain.
Joe Biden will lose for the exact same reason he received the lion’s share of Super Tuesday delegates: the ideology of the suburbs.
Marxists and other left-wing thinkers have long not known what to do about the suburbs. It’s a petite bourgeoisie, so something of an enemy, but also for the longest time accounted for the bulk of the electorate who actually shows up at the polls in November. Middle managers and petty tyrants abound in the suburbs but so do the economically precarious, the striving workers who would benefit most from social democratic policies. Also, most modern lefty commentators grew up in the suburbs, which naturally leaves them feeling somewhat conflicted.
They shouldn’t because the suburbs are the root of modern neofascism.
Often celebrated in history as indicative of the bursting American dream of the post-war era, the suburbs owe their birth more to white flight and an accelerated fossil fuel economy. As African-Americans moved to cities to pursue more upward mobility, the WASPy masters of the old metropoles moved out into curated ersatz villages. Such outer reaches used to be undesirable as light rail is criminally underdeveloped, but cars - and an endless supply of cheap petrol - changed all of that. For those who could afford all the loans, or could even hope to receive loans. Racism still looms in finance, as demonstrated by the easy adoption by MBA grads of racist conspiracy theories about lazy black folks defaulting on their mortgages and causing the 2008 crash.
But you’re familiar with all this. Especially as you’re, well, on this website. These are the material conditions of our post-industrial Forever Recession, well documented by journalists and economists who don’t owe their careers to parroting official lies.
What makes the suburbs the fecund swamp of reactionary thought isn’t just its roots, but it’s dreary daily reality. Each house is a self-contained universe, environmentally controlled and crammed with electronic toys to simulate real human feelings on demand. In between stand vast oceans of difference if only a few feet of distance. “Atomization” as the sociologists like to say, which prepares the suburban mind for scapegoating better than any national myths of Manifest Destiny and other thinly-veiled traditions of white supremacy. Why care about those kids in concentration camps when you don’t even relate to your neighbor’s kids, let alone your neighbor?
This human disconnect is compounded by the suburban fantasy of autonomy.
Where does your water come from? That’s obvious - the faucet! Every suburban home has something so few human homes have had throughout millennia. Ready access to (mostly) clean, potable water is both a tremendous civilizational advancement and so ubiquitous in the first world - especially American suburbs - to be wholly taken for granted. The same with electric lighting, climate control, and all the other features of the modern suburban house that makes the atomization of middle class Americans material as well as social. Because the source of these resources is occluded by their normalcy, and this feeds into a fantasy of independence in the suburban mind. That’s why libertarian talking points work so easily on the suburban middle class, why Democrats and Republicans spent the years from Reagan through Clinton courting this voting bloc with talk of tax cuts and deficit reduction and welfare reform - all things that only appeal to a person so alienated from the connecting networks of modern society that they really think of themselves as an island.
These are the “moderates” so sought after by pundits and political consultants. They are only moderate in gentle times, their commitment not being to “common sense solutions” but their own material security and sense of autonomous power. The basis for that security and power has been in decline since 2008 at the least and so the suburbs have lost their marbles.
That same systemic racism that drove the white flight to the suburbs still festers under the lawns and backyard barbecues. Without the peace and prosperity of the ‘90s and early ‘00s, that racism has risen like bile and spilled out as the Alt-Right, the failed children of the middle class grasping at whatever gives them drive and purpose but without any understanding of how wealth and power is sorted by class. Instead, raised in the toxic libertarian fantasies of the suburbs, alienated by those who correctly point out their privilege but do not recognized the shared precarity among all classes in post-recession America, they lash out at all the shibboleths of their parents. Blacks, gays, immigrants - all the Others that were subtly and not so subtly demonized by the talk radio and cable news that flattered their suburban forefathers as wielders of power. As John Dolan so famously said in the voice of the War Nerd, “Poor humble people are not jihadis; that’s an arrogant, middle-class phenomenon.”
That arrogant middle class is tainted, root and branch, by the individualist fantasy of the suburbs and its material comfort. A comfort only possible by a massive, intertwined system of public and private institutions. Some still show up for Biden and the lost fantasia he promises of a third Obama term, where Trump never happened. But from Gingrich to George W. Bush to Trump himself, the suburbs have shown they are fair-weather friends to such muddling centrism. As soon as their car payments go up, they will side with all that is grotesque in American politics.
